Robert Boyle's uncommon observations about vitiated sight, (London, 1688).

ROBERT BOYLE (1627-1691) is known to every schoolboy for his discovery of the law of gaseous elasticity, "Boyle's law". He was one of the foremost "experimental natural philosophers" of his time, an original fellow of the Royal Society of London and author of many works dealing with physics, chemistry, physiology, theology, etc. Not so well known perhaps is that he was created Doctor of Medicine of Oxford University in 1665 (Foster, 1891) and that scattered throughout his scientific writings are many discussions of medical subjects often based on his own astute clinical observations. Among these are several records of patients with visual disturbances and eye diseases, a subject in which he had a particular interest, as shown for example by his researches into the physics of light and the physiology of vision in Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664). This interest doubtless derived from his hypochondriacal concern when a youth about "a sense of decay in my Eyes" (Boyle, 1693), for which he consulted the great William Harvey (Boyle, 1663). For the rest of his life this "weakness made him very tender of them, and extremely apprehensive of such distempers as might affect them" (Birch, 1744). Three years before his death he gathered together a number of the more unusual ophthalmological cases he had seen under the title "Some Uncommon Observations about Vitiated Sight", and appended them as a separate tract to A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688): "Because that, the Eyes being those Parts of the Bodies of Men and other Animals, that I pitch'd upon in the Foregoing Treatise, to Strengthen the Doctrine deliver'd in it about Final Causes; it seem'd Suitable Enough to my Subject and Design, to mention some Uncommon Things that related to Vision or the Organs of it, that We may be invited both to Admire the Wisdom of God, which, to furnish Man with a Sense that requires the Concourse of so very many things, has, if I may so speak, Crowded them into so Small an Engine as an Eye; and to Celebrate his Goodness too, which has been Display'd in that, notwithstanding that the Eye is so very Compounded a Part, and the Sight so easily Vitiated yet the most part of Men by far do, from their Cradles to their Graves, enjoy the Benefit and Comfort of so Necessary and Noble a Sense" ([242-244]). This tract appears to have remained unnoticed by historians of ophthalmology,